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Crucial Adrenaline combines your existing hard drive and solid state cache into a single storage system to give you the best of both worlds: SSD-like performance without compromising the capacity of your hard drive.

Consumers are storing more and more personal content on their home computers, such as movies, photos, music, and multimedia documents. While traditional hard disk drives provide large amounts of storage at a low cost, solid state drives provide the ability to access that content much more quickly. Currently, the investment in a high-capacity SSD can be cost prohibitive for the average consumer. As an example, a 500GB SSD costs around $800 while a 500GB hard drive is only $80.

Crucial® Adrenaline addresses this pain point by allowing consumers to keep their existing hard drive while boosting its performance by up to 8 times1. A simple upgrade for Windows® 7 systems, Crucial Adrenaline offers consumers the best of both worlds: SSD-like performance and the capacity of a hard drive, all at an affordable cost.

Comprising a 50GB Crucial m4 SSD, a 3.5” adapter bracket, and Dataplex™ software, Crucial Adrenaline intelligently places, or “caches”, the most frequently needed files (active data) on the SSD and keeps the less frequently used files (inactive data) on the hard drive. Fully automated, the software runs in the background to combine the hard drive and solid state cache into a single storage system.

Features

Crucial Adrenaline enables your Windows 7-based PC to start up twice as fast and boosts performance of your hard drive by up to 8 times.

Comprising a 50GB Crucial m4 SSD, a 3.5" adapter bracket, SATA cable and Dataplex software, Crucial Adrenaline intelligently places, or "caches", the most frequently needed files (active data) on the SSD and keeps the less frequently used files (inactive data) on the hard drive. Fully automated, the software runs in the background and requires no user management.

A simple upgrade that allows you to keep your existing hard drive, and thus eliminating the need to transfer files & programs, Crucial Adrenaline offers the best of both worlds: SSD-like performance and the capacity of your hard drive at an affordable cost.

Dimensions & Weight

Height

9.5mm

Width

69.85mm

Depth

100.45mm

Weight

75g

Quick Info

WarrantyBeyond any applicable Newegg return policy, this item is warranted independently by the product's Manufacturer or a Third party. Below is a summary provided for convenience only and may not be accurate or current.
Read full details.

Rating: 1/5Update 2

Cons: Since my last review I have found that it will no longer work and you can no longer buy these. So this is just a warning to those that look at this in the future. See my last post on how to recover your lost partitions on your hard drive.

Other Thoughts: Fantastic idea, but I believe the drives just are not up to the task of working with the rewrites and it uses up the drive in a few months. Drive is not viewable by bios now.

Rating: 4/5Just An FYI

Pros: The best pro has been that Crucial and Dataplex by a company called Nvelo have stepped up to the plate to help me with this product. The product has been working as designed for about 4-5 months now and for me it has been worth the headaches. KNock on wood.

Cons: After a couple of months of good useage. I was upset the first time I turned on my computer and found that the partitions on my hard drive was gone. So after 3 firm ware updates (Final Crucial 040H.04.00) and the Dataplex software version 1.3.0.0, I have been stable. Thanks to Nvelo for getting it to me asap! Of course every time I had to update something it meant that I had lost the partitions on my hard drive. Major aggravation!

When you find that your drive is hosed up and the partitions are gone. Down load the iso file for Gparted Linux. Use it to boot your pc and then run the program called TestDisk. Be careful cause you can really break things with this. Use TestDisk to recover the backup that is automatically saved on the hard drive for the existing partitions. Once it is finished, then you can reboot and do a system repair with your Windows CD. Works with Windows Vista & 7.

Other Thoughts: The system I am running this on is a data recovery station so I am familiar with working with broken hard drives and dealing with a broken drive after installing something that should make it better is frustrating. But on a whole this adds real spead to drives that are to big to purchase as ssd's. This station has 4TB's in it so I can recover the new big drives. No complaints currently...

Rating: 1/5Worked for 6 months

Pros: Worked well since March then corrupted data resulting in significant data loss.

Cons: System crashed HARD. Although the BIOS says the drive is there, the Dataplex software didn't. The only way I could get the system to boot was to clear the cache. This resulted in major corruption of the C: drive to the point where chkdsk could not recover. I need to do a full system recovery from my backups. I will not be adding this back into the environment.

Other Thoughts: Although the theory is sound, the implementation is not. You'd be better off, and cheaper, to just put in something like a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive or to add a separate SSD and normal hard drive.

Rating: 5/5SSD performance

Pros: Easy to install, pretty cut an dry. Speeds H.D.D up. First ssd for me, cause I am cheap, installed a crucial M4 in customers build, an they LOVED it. Being so cheap, I watched Paul's video, and well figured sure.

Rating: 5/5Great been using for almost a year

Pros: This works great it will speed up your machine with out requiring a fresh install

Cons: Does not yet support RAID configurations

Other Thoughts: For those of you having issues with hit messing up your drive, it even says in the manual that due to the nature of how it works while installed your drive will not be able to load windows without this drive in place.

Also you can not run your SATA controller in RAID mode and expect this to work. If your getting this and have yet to install it make sure the first thing you do is update the SSD firmware this fixed about 20% of the issues i had out the gate.

This is a real 60 gb SSD but after the file system and what not only 50 is usable as the cache. You can use this drive as a real OS SSD if you want and just not install the Software!

Did you find this review helpful?

Thanks for the valuable feedback you provided!

Anonymous

8/5/2012 9:28:52 AM

Tech Level: 5/5

Ownership: 2/5

Verified Owner

Rating: 1/5Not very reliable

Cons: Then when I restarted, I got the error message that there was no boot drive. It looked like my momentus XT750 was trashed. I then did a new install with a 1TB Western Digital EARS drive and shortly after, not even after installing all of my programs, it trashed that drive also. They make it sound so easy... Just load the software any you will be much faster. I have wasted several days, no refund policy, so $90 down the drain.

Other Thoughts: Do yourself a favor and save up to buy a real SSD drive.

Rating: 5/5Good drive, but know what your doing.

Pros: -Drive has very good reliability in comparison with other caching drives on the market right now.-This is a great budget performance improvement. Think of it as a stepping stone from a standard 7200rpm drive towards completely solid state.-As a gamer, I would say the comparison of loading times reduction that goes from 45 seconds (normal hdd/first load time) to 25 seconds (second load) to 15 seconds (third time loading) is pretty accurate. Things are loaded and responsive freaking fast.-As a user of Photoshop and audio-editing tools I would say that the initial start up of these tools is much faster.

Cons: -A tad bit slower than some other caching drives (~85-90% performance compared to others) you do gain a lot more reliability though.-The software can be annoying. You need to be smart about installing the software once you have configured and made sure all internal hardware devices on your computer have drivers/are identified (sound cards, graphics cards inc.)-The software ONLY supports the drive you install your OS on, so don't cry when it doesn't cache your 3 other drives with all of your actual information. Install your OS on one large drive and move the stuff you want cached there.-Drive doesn't really come with a 'manual'

Other Thoughts: I bought this from crucial website, why? Because you need to buy it from them directly to get their manufacturers warranty. Its like 10$ more there in general, but its a 3 year warranty.

I would also like to say this requires some intelligence to use. There isn't much documentation, but reading what is there is pretty bloody useful. Also, following what I mentioned earlier about making sure your systems hardware is identified/installed.

To the people who are heavily skeptical of SSDs, they don't fail as much as some people say. If a normal hard drive has a 5% fail rate, an SSD probably has closer to 8%. Also, for SSDs usage pattern matters a lot, and having an over-provisioned drive like this is a good idea, or having trim support.

Through the Newegg EggXpert Review Program, Newegg invites its best reviewers, known as EggXperts, to post opinions about new and pre-release products to help their fellow customers make informed buying decisions.Click here for more details.

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